Art and theater reviews covering Seattle to Olympia, Washington, with other art, literature and personal commentary.
If you want to ask a question about any of the shows reviewed here please email the producing venue (theater or gallery) or email me at alec@alecclayton.com. If you post questions in the comment section the answer might get lost.

Thursday, February 25, 2016

"Torso" cast porcelain with gold leaf by Claudia Fitch, number one from edition of two, gift of Lucy and Herb Pruzan.

The first thing to catch the eye when entering the gallery
of new gifts to the Tacoma Art Museum is Guy Anderson's "Mountain
Picnic," a moody painting in oil on paper mounted on plywood. Next to it
is an equally dark and moody painting by Paul Horiuchi titled "Religious
Heritage", and "Introspection," a huge, equally dark painting by
Milton Simons. Nearby can be seen Kenneth Callahan's untitled painting of
fishermen or workers in a fish market (it's not clear which). These works
provide a fitting opening to a show celebrating (mostly) Pacific Northwest art,
because Anderson, Horiuchi and Callahan were all associated with the Northwest
Mystics or the Northwest School, which put our region on the international art
map.

Over the past five years, TAM has increased its permanent
collection to the tune of more than a thousand works of art. A large selection
of these works is included in this show, including paintings, sculptures,
drawings and prints, jewelry and more. It is a fairly representative collection
focusing on the museum's stated mission of ensuring the collections grows
"to fully represent the rich artistic identity of the Northwest and
broader western region."

There are some wonderful works of art to be seen, such as Michael
Spafford's three-part etching, "Leda and the Swan" and Drew Daly's
Escher-like sculpture, "Spindleback Merge." There are also some
pieces that are not museum worthy, such as Howard Kottler's ceramic sculpture,
"Sheldon" and Elizabeth Sandvig's "Peaceable Kingdom with
Clouds."

Sandvig has created many excellent paintings, but this is
not one of them. It is one of many in a series of "Peaceable Kingdom"
paintings on the subject made famous by the strange and wondrous painting of
lions and cattle and cherubic children by Edward Hicks. Sandvig's painting
looks clumsy and has none of the strangeness of Hicks' famous painting nor even
of other Sandvig paintings.

Like Sandvig, Kottler has produced some outstanding art, but
"Sheldon" is just clunky and garish.

But the good stuff - oh, the good stuff is delicious.
Spafford's three etchings on the myth of Leda and the Swan are beautiful and
strong, with a plethora of patterns, shapes and marks hidden within deceptively
minimalist curvilinear forms. They are strong and sensual, and show the hand of
a master. Similarly, Lauri Chambers' untitled oil painting has a lot going on
within what appears to be nothing more than two black lines on a big white
canvas. Almost hidden on the edges of her forms are layers and layers of marks
and scrapings, and the strong black shapes divide the canvas into an
interestingly asymmetric balance of positive and negative shapes.

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

For seven weeks, B2 gallery explores the
“alarm bells of consciousness” through idioms of
feminism,
race,
culture,
religion,
and the body politic -
welcoming the works of
internationally recognized artists:

Eric Overmyer’s strange and marvelous comedy, On the Verge, is like a marriage of Tom
Stoppard and Monty Python. As presented by Theater Artists Olympia, it is a
technical marvel. With little but a few wrapped boxes, some beautiful video
projections and a plethora of props, TAO has turned the tiny Midnight Sun
performance space into a set to match those in bigtime theaters with big
budgets. Kudos to designers Pug Bujeaud (who also directs), Maddox Pratt and
Michael Christopher, lighting designer Olivia Burlingame, and videographer
Pargoth Productions for turning a black box into a Taj Mahal (speaking
metaphorically as the denizens of Terra Incognita often do).

Night scene with the three adventurers.

Three adventurous explorers, Fanny (Heather R.
Christopher), Alex (Maggie Ferguson-Wagstaffe) and Mary (Dana Galagan) set off
through the jungle in search of Terra Incognita. It is the end of the 19th
century and these three women are early feminists.

On their journey they encounter many creatures and people
including a cannibal; a snowball-throwing abominable snowman; the apparition of
Mary’s husband, Grover; a troll that spouts beat poetry and quotes Kubla Khan —
eight characters in all, each played by Morgan Picton.

Throughout, the word play is prodigious and the humor is
esoteric and outrageous. The women speak in convoluted and poetic sentences
filled with rhyme, alliteration, onomatopoeia and pop culture references from
the past to the future as they forge not only through jungles and over
mountains, but into the future.

Early in their travels they pick up objects they do not
recognize, which they eventually realize are objects from the future such as an
“I Like Ike” button and a container of Cool Whip. The names of objects and of
people and events come to their minds seemingly out of nowhere in a process
they call osmosing. For example, they osmose the words “mo hair” and “Noxzema”
and “Jello mold,” and guess those might be what the Cool Whip they find is.

They travel from the past into the future. It’s 1955 and
they’re in America where they discover rock and roll and meet Nick Paradise
(Picton, of course), a sleazy but nice man who runs a casino.

Mary is the oldest of the women and the most set in her
ways; yet she turns out to be the most adventurous of all.

Alex is the youngest and the most enthusiastic. She’s in
favor of wearing trousers, which Mary and Fanny think is shocking. Mary says, "The
civilizing mission of woman is to reduce the amount of masculinity in the
world. Not add to it by wearing trousers.” Alex is a daydreamer, and she is
forgetful. She often says the wrong word: "I am delicious! I mean
delirious. Not delicious."

Fanny is snooty and stuck in her ways, and disapproves of
everything until a (spoiler) and a (spoiler) change her life.

The four actors playing these parts are terrific.

The audience may take many possible meanings from On the Verge. Bujeaud wrote: “I believe
the desire to recognize and illuminate our foibles and to move forward is the
brave thing. We all end up in the Undiscovered Country, in Terra Incognita,
maybe the idiom serves especially best here, the reminder that it is the journey
not the destination that is most important.”

Fanny is given to exclaiming, “Wow! Wow! Wow!” That
pretty much sums up my reaction to On the
Verge (or the Geography of Yearning).

On the
Verge,
Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. through Feb. 28, closing matinee 2:30 p.m.
Feb. 28, The Midnight Sun, 113 N. Columbia St.Tickets: $12-$15,Available at door night of show or online at http://olytheater.com/.

“Somewhere
between 1st and 2nd,” polychrome inflated steel by Aaron Badham,
courtesy University of Puget Sound.

Aaron
Badham’s playful and inventive sculptures can be seen in the main gallery space
in Kittredge Gallery, University of Puget Sound, while Rita Robillard’s
restful and hotly colorful Pacific Northwest landscapes grace the smaller back
gallery.

I was pleasantly surprised by Badham’s sculpture
after having seen photographs. They are not as monumental as I expected, which
was a slight disappointment (photographs can never capture scale), but the
colors, textures and forms were more interesting and more aesthetically pleasing
than expected (scale is not the only thing photographs fail to adequately
capture.)

Badham’s sculptures are described as soft. I did
not touch them, but they are made of inflated steel, which I suspect would be
hard to the touch, meaning they only look soft — a fun twist on what Claes
Oldenburg did with his soft sculptures of hard objects. Badham seems to have
his tongue firmly planted in cheek. He also has a great feel for abstract form.

Hard or soft, his sculptures are minimalist
abstract forms based on toys and machinery. Most of them combine hard, black,
machine-like clamps and other forms with the more soft-in-appearance inflated
forms that are brightly colored. They also remind me of Mylar balloons. Each is
a single color, some combined with the black parts and some not. The colors are
yellow, blue, white, green, purple and turquoise. The forms are simple and
mostly asymmetrical. Although they look like toys and machines, none are easily
identified, with the possible exception of one called “Somewhere between 1st
and 2nd,” which looks like a plow with five circular disc
blades.

His sculptures have a light-hearted pop-surrealist
feel that I thoroughly enjoyed.

In addition to the sculptures — there are only
seven of them — Badham is showing four nicely executed drawings and a set of
three zinc plate etchings, all of mechanical forms.

"Restorations," screen print and acrylic by Rita Robillard, courtesy University of Puget Sound.

Robillard’s landscapes are traditional scenes of
tall trees created by combining screen printing with acrylic painting. They
stand out due to interesting textures and hot colors that verge on being gaudy.
Some are mist-enshrouded scenes, and some have almost ghostly spatial depth.
This is most noticeable in one called “Pastoral/Tropicalismo,” a scene with
castles in the background and grazing cows in the foreground that look like
they are wading in water or floating above the surface. Overall her paintings
are too decorative for my taste and look as if they were created to be hung in
a medical or real estate office. But I like what she does with space and color,
and there is a mystical quality that I like.

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About Me

I am an artist and writer living in Olympia, Washington. I write an art review column, a theater review column and arts features for the Weekly Volcano, a community theater review column for The (Tacoma) News Tribune and regular arts features for OLY ARTS (Olympia).
My published novels are: This Is Me, Debbi, David; Tupelo; The Freedom Trilogy (a three-book series consisting of The Backside of Nowhere, Return to Freedom and Visual Liberties); Reunion at the Wetside; The Wives of Marty Winters; Imprudent Zeal and Until the Dawn. I've also published a book on art, As If Art Matters. All are available on amazon.com.
I grew up in Tupelo and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and have been living in the Pacific Northwest since 1988 where I am active in many progressive organizations such as PFLAG (Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays).